After far too long of silence or really freaking depressing news, I finally have some wonderful to share!

…with the help of gifs, of course, because why not?

I HAVE ANOTHER BOOK COMING OUT!!!

There isn’t an official-type announcement, but I did get the go ahead to say that my next book, BUTTERFLY GARDEN, has sold to Alison Dasho at Thomas & Mercer, and should be meeting the world early-ish next year.

BUTTERFLY GARDEN is actually an adult book (I know, weird, right?), and to the end of my days I may never figure out just where this story came from. That is probably a good thing. As giddy as I am, I’m also incredibly nervous. Maybe because a second book creates very different expectations than a debut, maybe because it’s adult instead of YA, probably because it’s a much creepier part of my brain that I’m introducing to the world with this.

How does your garden grow?

with pretty maids all in a row…

All houses have secrets, but some are darker than others. When the FBI discovers the macabre collection of a sociopath, they try to piece together a crime they never could have imagined, with the reluctant help of a survivor who knows the story is far more than simply ‘what happened’.

Getting the story out of her? Well, that’s a different matter, and it leads some to wonder just what her role in this twisted garden might have been.

It’s been a while since A WOUNDED NAME sold (three years and change?) and I’ll admit, I was starting to feel a little hopeless. No matter how much hope and determination and patience you have, you hit stretches where you start to feel….well…

But the amazing Sandy Lu persevered, and voila! BUTTERFLY GARDEN! I cannot wait to share more with you about this scary brain-child. In the midst of all the crazy and frustrating still controlling the rest of my life, this news is a much-needed celebration and shot of joy to carry me onward.

Tomorrow marks two weeks of unemployment for me. I’m not panicking yet- last time I couldn’t get a job, it stretched for a whole six months- but it’s led to a lot of thinking for me, in between the cleaning and procrastinating. Mostly, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about control.

Because realistically, I can’t control my employment. I can put out applications, I can search and interview and do my best, but I can’t control what actually happens. It’s led me to other things I can’t control.

I can write the best book I can write, but I can’t guarantee that the book will sell better than my writing a custom annotated bibliography practice back in the time when I was a student. It’s out of my hands, and in the hands of an editor who can decide that he or she wants to buy it. I can do my best, my fabulous agent can do her best, but in the end, it depends on a lot of factors, like what else is in the catalog, like what the current trends are, like the purely subjective likes and dislikes of an acquisitions board. A lot of factors, factors over which I have no control.

Once a book is out there, the way it’s perceived is entirely out of my control. Books become, to many readers, very personal things. The way we enjoy them, the way we react to them, says a lot about us. I can’t control what people think of my writing. Once it’s out there, I can’t argue with people that I think miss the point, can’t tell them what I meant to do. Hell, J.K. Rowling is a superstar and she can’t get away with it without a furor. And really, that’s as it should be. Once it’s in the hands of the reader, it’s open to interpretation, to personal perception. I can’t make anyone like my book. I can’t control whether or not someone enjoys it. Love it or hate it, it’s out of my hands.

Publishing is a crazy industry that attempts to balance art and business. It’s a juggernaut, really, that steams along to its own timeline. There are eight million numbers and considerations and factors and none of it is in my hands. I can make my contributions on one end or another, but I can’t control it. YA readers on Twitter the other day may have seen #TheArchivedNeedsaThirdBook. For some context, The Archived is an absolutely amazing book by Victoria Schwab. It’s creepy and atmospheric, exciting, heart-wrenching, unexpectedly funny, with the lyrical, gorgeous writing we’ve come to expect from Victoria. It’s sequel, The Unbound, came out at the end of January, and it is just as good. Where the first book was an external enemy, this book is largely internal; the main character is shattering and struggling to make everyone believe she’s okay. A very large part of this book is the realization that it’s okay to NOT be okay for a while after trauma. The story is such that things can end here; it’s the characters that need a third book, and there was originally supposed to be one, but as we know, in publishing, sometimes things happen. They’re not done intentionally, they’re not done to hurt anyone, but it is, at the end of the day, a business, and a business is about numbers and projects and yes, about passion. The hashtag was a fan movement to try to sway the publishers, but at the end of the day, a trending hashtag isn’t going to make a difference to the business. (It will, however, make a hell of a difference to an author to get that kind of outpouring of love and support). What makes a difference to the publisher is sales. Aside from the contribution of buying books from authors I love so they can hopefully make more of them, I can’t control other books. I can’t control other authors. I can’t control publishers, or timelines, or release dates. I can’t.

I’ll be honest, Other People as a collective tend to piss me off. Not in a “you’re awful” kind of way, but in an “I don’t want to be dealing with you” kind of way. I am an introvert; I prefer not to deal with people if I can possibly avoid it, because I’m awkward and self-conscious and I hate feeling like an idiot in social situations. But I learned a long time that I can’t control other people. I can’t control behavior, or statements, or preferences. I can take accountability for my own actions, but not for theirs. I can’t control luck or good fortune, or bad fortune, I can’t make other people live with compassion or mindfulness.

There are so many things out of our control it’s frankly a wonder we can convince ourselves anything IS in our control. There is so much about life that we don’t get to decide. We can’t choose the weather, or the climate (unless you choose to move, but even then, have you noticed how things have been recently?). We as individuals have a say in our government, but we don’t really choose it. We can’t control the jury summons or the illness or the falling in love. We can’t choose a lot of things, and where there is no choice, there is no control. It all seems rather a hopeless business, doesn’t it? But there’s something comforting, in a strange sort of way, about acknowledging how small we are, how generally powerless we are. Because when we admit to ourselves all the things we CAN’T control, we start to understand the things we CAN control.

I can’t control what happens with my writing, but I can control the writing itself. Yes, there are bad days, where every word is a struggle and I’ll probably end up deleting most of them the next time I sit down to work, but those are generally rare. More to the point, what I can control is sitting down and DOING IT. I can control the process of sitting my butt in the chair and WRITING. I can choose to open the file, the notebook, the book. I can choose to exercise my craft and expand my voice. Whatever comes after is out of my hands, but it is precisely in my hands to shape the story and spill it onto the page.

I’m not by nature a disciplined person, but I can change that. I can control that. I can make it better. Right now my apartment is slowly getting cleaner than any living space of mine has probably ever been, and it’s kind of creeping me out a little, because everything is getting organized and neat and in its place, and that’s just not normal for me. But I’m making the choice, here and now, to keep it that way. To start the good habits and maintain them. I’m usually someone who waits for the mood to write, or who waits for the day off, but I would very much like to get into the habit of writing at least five hundred words every day. Even if it’s not on my main project of the moment, just so I’m writing SOMETHING every single day. Starting good habits is hard. Maintaining good habits is REALLY hard. But- I can choose to have the self-discipline to enforce them, and right now, I choose that.

I’m not able to control what happens to my books, but I can choose to keep pursuing the goals I’ve set. I can control whether or not I give up. Determination, persistence, they’re hard, especially because they traverse so close to the border of delusional and trying too hard. Sometimes, no matter how badly we want something, no matter how hard we work for it, it just doesn’t happen, and we do have to accept that. Sometimes that means we have to shift our goals. It doesn’t mean we have to give up. Determination got me my first book deal. I can choose to continue that determination.

Okay, so this one is actually really difficult. Life has a way of throwing things at us, and it’s hard to control your outlook in trying times. But if I can’t control my emotions well enough to be optimistic, I can at least control them enough to not wallow in misery. I can choose to temper my outlook with a bit of joy and hope, or at least a really sick sense of humor. I can’t control the world, but I can control how I look at it, and I can control how I choose to move through it.

Because at the end of things, the only thing I can really control is myself. All those other factors, all those other things, that I can claim to control, all those really boil into one single thing: me. And as long as I can control myself, as long as I can choose to make myself better, to do better, I can get by.

So now, you have a finished, polished manuscript, one on which you’ve received honest and detailed critiques, a manuscript that is the best you can possibly make it.

You’ve done your research- you know if you want to self-publish, sign with an agent, or go traditional on your own.

You’ve done even more research- looked at self-publishing companies, looked up agents and what they’re looking for, looked up publishers that accept un-agented manuscripts.

So what now?

If you’re self-publishing:
There’s not a lot I can offer you from here; this isn’t a path I’ve taken. Just don’t commit to anything you haven’t researched. As you’re looking at different companies that can help you, look at the various prices they have listed, and start to list out your own budget. Go right down the line of expenses: editing, formatting, book design, cover design, publishing, returnable options, distribution, publicity. Decide what you can afford for each category, and where you can give a little on one to gain on another. If you’re not financially ready for this kind of investment, WAIT. You don’t want to put out less than your best. Not only will you be cheating all the hard work you’ve done thus far, but you’ll also limit your options in the future. If your first public effort is less than, um…well, less than good, it’s a lot harder to get readers interested in a second book, and that’s just not how you build a career. Also, if you can’t afford to do it right, you don’t want to ruin yourself financially in the hopes that it’ll be a runaway bestseller and make you tons of money in the first month. The simple truth is- and this goes for any form of publishing– you cannot rely upon publishing to pay your bills. Not at first, and honestly, many authors never make it to that point. Publishing is a dream, yes, but you have to be realistic about it. Having a book out doesn’t mean much if you sacrifice your ability to pay your rent. Or buy food. Explore your options, make your decisions carefully, and when in doubt, look to those who’ve had some success with it. Don’t be afraid to ask questions.

If you want to submit directly to publishers:
Again, not a path I’ve taken, but make sure you pay attention to submission guidelines. Every publisher that accepts unsolicited manuscripts will tell you EXACTLY what they want you to send them. For some, it will be the full manuscript. Some will ask for a certain number of pages or chapters. Some will ask for a synopsis, some won’t. I know the gut feeling is to say “Screw it, I’ll send them everything, I just know they’ll love the first pages too much to want to wait for the rest!” Yeh, don’t do that. Send them what they ask for, no more, no less.

Another gut feeling is to send the first few chapters through such a strenuous polishing process that those first pages are AMAZING- but then the rest of the manuscript hasn’t gotten that kind of attention. Agents and publishers both see this a lot. The first chapters have been workshopped to death and the rest just can’t hold up. You want your submission to be balanced, to be equally strong the whole way through.

Once you’ve sent it off, resist the impulse to send follow-up e-mails every ten minutes. This is hard, I know. Still, you’ve got to resist it. The process takes time, and harassing them with follow-ups isn’t going to persuade them to read your submission any faster. In those agonizing weeks and months while you’re waiting to hear from them, do something else. Go on a reading binge. Work on a new project. Learn how to knit. Something to help distract you from sitting and stewing about it. Keep track of your submissions, including when you sent it off. You don’t want to send out one, wait until you get a response, then send off a second. Send in bunches, small enough for you to keep track of, large enough that you’re not wasting time.

If you want to query agents:
Welcome to the query letter! Also known as the strangest level of hell since the invention of the resume cover letter. Which makes sense, given that they accomplish much the same thing. There are thousands, perhaps even millions, of sites out there with advice on how to write a query letter. I looked at a lot of them while I was querying. What I can share with you here is my own distillation, what I found in my experience worked the best for me.

Step One
Get the agent’s name right.

No, seriously, this does actually bear emphasizing, because too many people don’t bother. This is how your letter is literally opening. This is the agent’s first encounter with you. Do not say “Dear Agent”. You want to personalize it, you want to address it to the person you are actually talking to. At the same time, you don’t want to be overly familiar. Don’t use just the first name, or a nickname. Use the name he or she has listed on his/her website.

A note on titles: when it comes to using Mr, Mrs, Ms, or Miss, there are differing opinions on that. Mr. is usually pretty safe (so long as you are very VERY sure that you are addressing a male; names can be tricky things), but the feminine titles can cause problems. I know some people prefer to use the titles, insisting that it’s more respectful, but I honestly prefer to use the first and last name as listed on the websites. There’s less chance of causing accidental offense that way by using the wrong one.

Spell the name correctly. It’s on the personal website, there really is no excuse for getting this one wrong. This is one of the very few things about a query that is black and white right or wrong.

Step Two
Hook your book.

Different websites and books will give you different opinions about the order a query letter should go in, but this is the one I prefer. You’re writing to the agent to talk about your book, so start with the book. This is a single paragraph, sometimes two if they’re short, that should spark interest in your book. It’s not quite a back cover copy, but it’s more than a twitter pitch.

(side note: don’t pitch on twitter unless specifically invited to do so during a #pitchmad or similar contest; it’s rude and out of place and tends to really piss people off. On the same note, don’t pitch on facebook. Or in the comments of a blog. There are specific avenues acceptable for querying, and you need to stick to those.)

This isn’t the place to go into detail. You don’t need to say everything about your book, every plot point, every character, every twist. This is your book in the most general terms. Think of this as the elevator pitch. You have 90 seconds: GO.

(Personal example: Hamlet Danemark V, Headmaster of Elsinore Academy, is dead and buried, but some secrets seep past the grave: the poison of a man who murders his brother to claim his wife and position; the poison poured into a son’s grief and twists the sorrow bloody; the poison of pills meant to strip away a world no one else can see.

For Ophelia, poison is just another way to drown, and she’s drowned before. When Dane makes a promise to avenge his father’s murder, she knows she’ll drown again- in his pain, in his rage, in his play at madness that becomes all too real. Revenge, after all, is a messy business.)

Step Three:
Define your book.

This accomplishes two things: first, it tells an agent what they should be expecting; second, it tells them you know what you’re talking about. Or, if you don’t do this carefully, tells them that you don’t know what you’re talking about.

This is where you say the title, the word count, the genre, and where appropriate, the category. (I say that because Young Adult and Middle Grade aren’t genres, they’re age categories. Calling a book Young Adult tells us the age it’s meant for but not what type of book it is; it doesn’t tell us if it’s paranormal or romance or thriller or what.) This is fairly succinct, almost a stats listing.

Titles aren’t the be all and end all. A good title can be intriguing, and the ability to come up with good, compelling titles is a definite plus, but titles change all the time. You have to put SOMETHING down, and you should try to make it good and appropriate, but the fact is, titles are hard. A bad title is not going to kill your chances.

Word count tells an agent how well you know you category. Genres and categories tend to have ranges of word counts. YA, for example, generally runs 75K-100K. There are always exceptions, of course, either shorter or longer, but a 140K word YA novel is going to make agents a little leery. Sometimes that means there’s too much story for one book. Sometimes that means there are just too many words, and the manuscript is in desperate need of red pen and a machete. But sometimes, it means that it’s a tight, fast-paced, well-written story that tricks you with its length by coming off as a much shorter book when you’re actually reading it. Word count, as long as it’s reasonably near range, isn’t an automatic disqualifier. If you go over 200K for anything other than epic high fantasy or in-depth non-fiction, you’re probably in the auto-reject pile.

This is a bit more like a twitter-pitch. You don’t have to keep it 140 characters or less, but it is short, and it is to the point.

(Personal example: Complete at approximately 99,000 words, Elsinore Drowning is a haunting, modern retelling of Hamlet through Ophelia’s voice for a Young Adult audience.)

Step Four:
Let’s talk about you.

No, seriously, this is where you get to talk about yourself. Agents aren’t after your life story, but they do want to hear a little about you. What do you do, what makes you the best one to tell this story. If you’ve ever won awards for writing, talk about them here. Member of any writing societies? (Preferably official ones). If you’ve ever published anything, here’s the place to talk about it. If that something is self-published, you might want to include sales numbers (if they’re respectable). Do you have a blog with millions of followers, or some other Cool Thing that means people might fall over themselves trying to buy your book? YOU SHOULD MENTION THIS. All of this relates directly into your sellability as an author- your brand, as it were. If you have a devoted following, you have the beginnings of a devoted readership; agents like to know these things.

Be aware that most agents will google the crap out of you if they’re even remotely interested. If you’re full of BS, they’ll spot it.

And this is where good behavior on the internet becomes a really, REALLY important thing, because agents (and editors) pay attention. If you’re ranting and raving about rejections or the slow pace of things, if you’re throwing tantrums, if you’re insulting to other writers, authors, reviewers, or bloggers, you’re not winning yourself any points. Agents and authors don’t have to be best friends, but they do have to be able to work together; if you’re showing yourself to be an unholy terror, don’t expect too much interest.

One of my best friends had a first conversation with an agent and was shocked when her wedding pictures came up as a subject- they were on her facebook. This isn’t stalking, this is research, the same research you did before you queried agents. They want to know who they’re dealing with, and people, seriously, the internet never forgets. Make good behavior a habit now if it isn’t already and save yourself a lot of heartache. Rant and rave and cry and pout in private ALL YOU WANT- it can be a very healthy stress relief- but don’t do it online, don’t do it where anyone and his mother can see it. You’re presenting yourself as a professional. Act like one.

(Personal example: I come from a mixed background of theatre and writing and for several years have worked at Barnes and Noble and a Kids/Teen Lead, where I gush about amazing books, want to purchase far too many of them, and do a happy dance very time a kid comes back for more adventures. I am not yet published.
My writing awards were, by this point, really out of date, so I didn’t talk about them. My background in theatre was directly connected to the fact that my book was based on Hamlet, working in a bookstore gave me additional knowledge and audience. Is it a ton to go off of? No. Which is why it’s VERY SHORT.)

Step Five:
Why this agent?

Some people prefer to put this first, or to put it right after the definition of the book, but I prefer to put it here, because it leads directly into the list of what’s included with the query and allows you a graceful way to close out.

This is where you’re telling THIS agent why you’ve chosen to query him or her. You can- and should- create a query template for yourself, wherein the bulk of the letter is the same every time, but the initial greeting and this paragraph should be personalized for every single agent. Yes, it’s time consuming, yes, it’s work, but it’s worth it.

But please, for the love of God PLEASE, make it appropriate. If you follow them on twitter, GREAT, you can say so, but if you’re going to talk about it, make sure it’s relevant. Talking about how cute their kid is? NOT A GOOD IDEA. Besides being unprofessional, it’s also a bit creepy. But mentioning that they participated in a twitter wishlist and requested “A YA that has X, Y, and 3.5”, and here’s why I think mine fits, hey, that’s a very good use of it. Same with things they’ve specifically mentioned on their blog or website. If you met them at a conference and they requested this, give them a gentle reminder here (and if you’re sending the query as an e-mail, put THE NAME OF THE CONFERENCE+REQUEST along with your title in the subject line, unless they specifically tell you to do otherwise- this gives them the heads-up that this is something in which they’ve already expressed moderate interest).

Querying an agent is not like picking a substitute teacher. You are not going down a list of more or less equally skilled people who simply need to fill a space for a day. This is not a case of “are you warm? Are you breathing? Good enough”. You are seeking a highly skilled, specialized individual who with whom you will be able to forge a solid working relationship. You need to know why you’re querying this agent, and not that agent, and you need to be able to say that.

Also, list what you’ve included with the query. Agents will request different things from you- it’s highly personalized, and you need to be able to keep track of it. At one time, one of my submission lists had query only, three pages, five pages, five pages and synopsis, ten pages, ten pages and bio, three chapters, fifty pages. You have to know what you’re sending to which agent. This also tells the agent that you’ve paid attention to their submission guidelines. Avenues of research are useful, but only to a point- books are very quickly inaccurate, unofficial websites that gather information can be wrong or outdated. When it doubt, always go with what the agent says on his or her website. If there is nothing listed, only an address that says send queries to, just send the query. Some sources will tell you to default to five or ten pages, but honestly, if they want to see past they query, they’ll ask.

Do not send more than they ask for.

Send everything they ask for.

If an agent does ask for material to be included with the query, paste it in below the query in the e-mail. Do not submit the materials as attachments unless specifically instructed to do so by the agent. Attachments are terrifying. Attachments are risks. Most agents aren’t going to take that kind of risk on a query they didn’t ask for. Save yourself an auto-delete, and don’t do it.

(Personal example: While researching your agency, I saw that you were interested in stories with a unique voice, something I hope you’ll recognize within Ophelia. Below, please find the first five pages, a synopsis, and a brief bio per your site request. If this piques your interest, further material is available upon request. Thank you for your time and consideration.

Note that I’m not the most graceful individual when I’m conducting professional correspondence. I’m awkward and self-conscious, so I’m a bit stilted, and as long as you’re basically socially functional, you can probably be forgiven for a little awkwardness. You want to smooth things out to the best of your ability, but if you come off as a little stiff, don’t fret about it. That isn’t going to be the thing that sends the agents running for the hills.

Step Six:
Sign off.

This is another one that might sound strange, but the way you end your letter is just as important as how you begin it. Do not sign off with Yours Truly or Love or Always Yours or anything remotely of that nature. No. Just don’t do it. This is still professional communication.

That being said, I really hate signing things Sincerely. I am sincere, of course (usually, but always in professional circumstances) but I tend to sign off with Respectfully. Not Impatiently Yours or Impatiently Waiting or Desperate To Be Published. If you go with something other than the traditional Sincerely, it should still be professional and respectful.

And of course your name.

SOME TIPS

Just some things to keep in mind.

Be patient.
Keep track of your submissions, and note what an agent says his or her response time generally is. Also note one very important thing: NOT EVERY AGENT RESPONDS. There are a (large) number of agents who tell you to assume that no response means no interest. If the response time has passed for these agents, assume they’re not interested, and move on. If the agent promises a response, note the time span. Then, if the time has passed, give it a couple more weeks and then send a polite, non-pushy email with your query information in the subject line along with FOLLOW UP, and simply state that you submitted your query on such and such date, and simply wish to inquire as to the status now that such amount of time has passed.

Be organized about it. I can be a little OCD, I admit it, but I have a notebook for every project. These notebooks are where I do my brainstorming, my outlining, my character explorations, excerpts, writing stats, and these are also where I (used to) put my query lists. Agent name, agency, how I found them, what they said they were looking for, what they wanted submitted, date of submission, expected response time or no response. Then, as I got answers (or didn’t) I updated the notes. I also kept separate folders on my computer. In the folder for that manuscript, I had a submissions folder. Every batch of submissions I sent out had another folder with the date, and within that folder, every agent had his or her own folder, which contained the personalized query, as well as whatever other material they requested. This way, I knew at a glance what I’d sent, knew exactly what date to use as start date. Anal much? Yes, probably. But you know what, I never lost track of any of my queries. And honestly, it reassured me, knowing roughly when to expect things.

Being patient isn’t easy. This is our dream! This is all we can ever think of in a day, and every minute that passes, we start biting our nails or drumming our fingers or whatever the nervous tic du jour is, and we want to KNOW. More to the point, we want to SUCCEED. But once we hit send, it’s out of our control. We can only control our behavior and what we submit. We can’t control agent reaction. We can’t control rejection or acceptance. So be patient. Find something else to do. Don’t pester, don’t nag, don’t rant and rave at every moment.

Don’t query before you’re ready.
This breaks down into two parts. First part: do you have your materials ready? And not just whatever it is they’ve requested. I know the common joke is that agents take forever to respond, but sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they come back five minutes after your query is sent and they’re requesting the full. If you’ve polished and polished and polished the first few chapters on the expectation that you’d then have weeks to get to the rest of it, YOU CAN’T TRUST THAT. You have to be prepared.

Second part: are you mentally ready for this? I’ll be honest, querying is exhausting. It is an emotional roller coaster. It’s one thing to SAY that we understand that a rejection is a lack of interest in our manuscript, not a personal cut. Sure. We can say that. But rejection is HARD, y’all. It is. And when the rejections start piling up, it can become overwhelming.

And here’s the thing: you’re allowed to be overwhelmed. You’re allowed to have a meltdown and start sobbing into your pint of Ben and Jerry’s. You’re allowed to have a freak out that you’re nothing and you’ll never be published and oh God what were you thinking. And you know, you can even rant about how agents clearly have no idea what they’re missing out on. Just do it in private. Do with it a friend or family member, someone who has the sense to listen and not try to say anything (and more importantly not share anything). Just don’t do it in public.

The process of querying is this crazy zigzag of hope and ecstasy and anticipating and fear and worry and despair and anger, and you have to be ready for it. You have to go into this knowing that very few people have everything fall in place easily, that for most people, there are many rejections, many silences. You get a request for further material and OH MY GOD IT’S AMAZING but then there’s a whole new level of fear.

Don’t be afraid to re-write your query.
There are so many drafts of my query letters it’s kind of ridiculous. I wrote seven or eight drafts before I ever set out the first round of submissions. Then, as I started to hear back from each round, I worked on tweaking my query, trying to tailor it better, or make it more intriguing. Sometimes I was successful. Sometimes I wasn’t. Always keep a copy of the query you actually sent out, but it’s okay to make it better for the next round of queries. You learn by doing. You learn by feedback. Improvements are never a bad thing.

Don’t be jealous.
This one is hard. We all hear about the people who send out one query to their ‘dream agent’ and get signed, and then six weeks later there’s a huge multi-house auction that lands a three book deal for seven figures and everyone is watching with green eyes and a large vocabulary of curses. The fact is, we hear about these things to such an extent BECAUSE THEY’RE RARE. Most of us have to slog through round after round, and maybe even project after project, before we get a little bit there. It’s easy to be jealous of other people. Don’t be. Luck will always be an element, but sheer determination factors in there too. Rather than dwelling on what other people are doing or getting, focus on what YOU can do. Look for the stories that don’t invoke Cinderella, the ones where it was patience and determination and persistence that got them to their goal.

It took me three years and three projects to sign with an agent, and now that I am where I am, I can be grateful for it, because Sandy is amazing. We’re very well paired, and she gets the dark and twisty products of my imagination. I am where I need to be.

Don’t give up.
You want this- so go after it. Learn from each experience, make it better for the next round, but don’t take those rejections as proof you should tuck this dream back into the corner of the mental closet. You can’t get anywhere by giving up. But, on that note:

Know when to give up.
Not on the endeavor- but maybe on that specific manuscript. If you’ve queried everyone you can think of that accepts your genre and category and not gotten anywhere, maybe this isn’t the manuscript that’s going to sign you.

AND THAT’S OKAY.

Because you’ve kept writing, right? You’ve got something that, built off your experiences, is stronger. Better. Something that you can work on to make even better, and even stronger. And when you’ve reached the point, many MANY MANY MANY queries in, that maybe that first project needs to get shelved for a while, you have something else. And you can start over.

Except it’s not starting completely over, because the experience has taught you a lot. You have an advantage this time: you’ve done this before, and you know more or less what to expect.

Like I said, I queried three different projects over three years. It broke my heart to shelve those earlier projects, but I knew it was the right choice. I knew what I had waiting in the wings, these things I’d written while trying not to go crazy while the queries were out, I KNEW these things were better. I knew they showcased my writing better, that I’d learned and grown and expanded into characters and story and pacing.

Each time, you have the chance to get better, to improve not only your writing but your querying. As long as you’re willing to honestly assess yourself and your writing, you have the opportunity to improve your chances.

Don’t beat a project long past any chance it has to attract someone- know when to put it away and put out something better.

Last tip.
Don’t be afraid to ask questions.
The internet is a wonderful thing. It gives you access to a TON of people who have gotten where you want to be- so when you need to know something and you can’t find the answer- when you need to be reassured- don’t be afraid to ask. A lot of authors, especially in the YA community, have ask boxes on tumblr. They have blogs where you can leave comments. So ask.

Be respectful of the space and circumstances. There are times when it’s not particularly appropriate to ask some things; let common sense guide you.

But we’re here, on tumblr, on twitter, on facebook, on blogs. There are interviews and newsletters and signings and panels, and you know what? For as much rejection as we have to experience, even after we get those first steps in the door, publishing is a ridiculously inclusive community. People cheer each other on, because when people are reading, this is good for ALL OF US. We want you to succeed. We want to cheer you on when you announce your sale, when you have signings and events and features. We want to celebrate your successes with you.

So consider this post an open thread for any questions you have. I’ll answer what I can, and I’ll try to point you to others when I don’t know what to say.

Welcome to the middle of January! When the New Year’s Resolutions are just beginning to flag and we’re starting to curse ourselves for making them in the first place!

No, but seriously, this is the time when our resolutions start meeting reality, and we begin to understand just what we’re getting ourselves into. And for a lot of people in this community, those resolutions have to do with publishing: get an agent, sell a book, have a book come out, etc. These are dangerous resolutions, mainly because: you can’t control a lot of that. A resolution is something you’re supposed to accomplish within THAT year, and if publishing is a realm of hopes and dreams, it’s also a land of harsh reality. The simple fact is, try as you might, even if what you put out there is your absolute best, you may not get to where you want to be in a single year. Sometimes there are miracles and your dream comes true right away, but for most of us, it takes patience and persistence.

BUT.

For those of you that are tackling this mountain this year, whether as a goal or as a resolution, here are some things to keep in mind, things I learned from my own process.

Are you really ready?

It’s incredibly tempting to say “Yes, oh my God, I was BORN READY!!!!”-

-but don’t. Take the time to really step back and look at your manuscript. Are. You. Ready.

-Is the manuscript finished? With very few exceptions, almost all of them non-fiction, your manuscript MUST BE FINISHED. This is for a lot of reasons. For one thing, it’s a lot easier to start a project than to finish one. Whether you’re submitting to agents or publishers, they need to see all of it. They need to see that your writing stays consistent, that you have a full grasp of the story and character arcs, that you can maintain the pace to a satisfying conclusion. There’s not a lot anyone other than a critique partner can do with an unfinished manuscript. If your manuscript is not finished, this is your first step: FINISH IT. Sit your butt in the chair and get it done.

-Is the manuscript polished? The only people who should see your first drafts are your critique partners. First drafts are full of mistakes and gaping holes, with many, many things that need to be fixed. That’s why they’re FIRST drafts. You don’t want to flash around anything that isn’t your best. Whatever you’re hoping to accomplish, whether it’s signing with an agent, selling to a publisher, or self-publishing, your manuscript needs to be the best you can possibly make it. The BEST, not “good enough”. If you’re satisfied with good enough, you’re cheating yourself, cheating your work, and cheating everything you hope to achieve. Editing is work- HARD work- but you owe it to yourself and to your story to do a solid job of it.

-Who else has seen it? And perhaps more importantly, are the opinions legitimate? I know that sounds kind of weird, but if the only person who’s seen your manuscript is your mom, you need to get some more feedback on it. Moms (and dads) are pretty much obligated to adore you and everything you do, so unless you are very, VERY sure that your family members will give you an honest and detailed critique, don’t base your good feelings about your manuscript purely on their approbation. Find people with experience writing, with experience critically reading. Maggie Stiefvater has a Critique Partner dating service from time to time, and if you’re in the market, definitely keep an eye on her blog for when the posts come up. If you can’t find a CP, especially if you can’t find a critical reader, consider making the investment to have a freelance editor look at it, for correctness if nothing else, but if you can get a detailed crit, that’s wonderful. If you’re writing Middle Grade, Young Adult, or New Adult, check out Manuscript Critique Services, run by four YA authors who know their shizz. (They’re by no means the only critique service out there, but they’re GOOD- and they give you a way to test the waters before committing to a full shebang). If you decide to go this route, do your research- there are a lot of freelance groups and individuals out there, at varying levels of skill, experience, and services offered, and you need to really decide what’s going to be best FOR YOU and FOR YOUR WORK.

If you’re planning on self-publishing, chances are you’re going to have to put money down; this is how most of the self-pubs operate. You’re making the investment on the expectation that you will sell enough to recoup that initial cost and hopefully then some. Given that, if you are self-pubbing, USE AN EDITORIAL SERVICE. An error in a blog post is one thing (still tacky, but hey, it happens, and it’s not the end of the world). Errors in a finished book also happen, but it’s rare to find more than two or three in the final copy. This is because humans make mistakes, and as much as we’d love to believe we catch everything, things happen. However, the number of mistakes and errors and screw-ups that get caught through the various stages of the editing process is staggering. Editors and copy-editors are invaluable, and if you choose not to go with traditional pubs, you should really consider making this investment. A good editor, freelance or otherwise, isn’t just looking for mis-spelled words or crazy commas. They’re looking at agreement, at word choice, at sentence structure and cadence, at consistency, at usage. A very good editor is also looking for correctness- do you know what the hell you’re talking about. One of the biggest reasons a lot of self-pubbed books get dismal reviews is because people can’t get past the lack of proper editing to get into the story or characters.

-Can you write the back cover of your book? This may or may not be something you end up ACTUALLY doing, depending on the path you choose, but you need to be ABLE to do it. The back cover is what you’re telling people who ask you what it’s about. The back cover is what you’re including in query letters or cover letters. The back cover is what gets people interested. It also says that yes, you know EXACTLY what your book is about, that you can sum it up succinctly, that you can make it a straightforward pitch. If you can’t intrigue someone with this, chances are, they’re not going to read on, and you’ve wasted an opportunity. If you self-publish, this is something you HAVE to be able to do for yourself.

Checks down the line?
Next up, we have:Choose your path.

Publishing has, in many ways, become a Choose Your Own Adventure book. There are so many options out there, and you really need to be sure of which way you want to go, because it does change how you approach things. No matter what path you ultimately choose, the first step is the same.

-DO YOUR RESEARCH. Here in the age of the internet, there is so much information available for remarkably little effort. There are writer resources all over the place, there are author blogs, agent blogs, editor blogs. There’s twitter, and tumblr. It’s actually pretty easy to drown in the information, there’s so much out there. Do a LOT of research, and make sure you can understand what information is useful and what isn’t. Towering rages against traditional publishing by someone who sent out two unsolicited submissions to publishers who don’t accept the genre? Not useful. A point by point breakdown by someone who’s done both traditional and self-publishing, and what they liked and disliked about both? VERY USEFUL.

The thing is, you need to understand the decision you’re making. Too many people think of self-publishing as a cop-out, as something you do if you can’t make it in the big leagues. Too many people think traditional publishing is a dead form bent on sales at the expense of quality. Neither is true. Self-publishing is a completely valid way to go about getting your book out there, BUT: you need to be aware that all of the responsibilities that are normally shared within a publishing house will all fall on you, and you need to be prepared for that. Any path you choose requires a hell of a lot of work and commitment.

Something I will say- as a bookseller, not as an author- is that self-published books can be very difficult to get on the shelves. (And being completely fair, a lot of traditionally published books can be difficult to get on the shelves, if they’re a smaller house or smaller title). However, for a bookstore, the traditionally published books are a safer risk. Almost every traditional publisher has a returnable feature on their titles, which means that after a certain period of no sales within a store, the store can send it back to the distribution center, where it can cycle out to other stores (or wait ignominiously to be marked down to bargain, as sometimes happens). The store gets credit for the return, the book sits at the warehouse and go out again at a later point. Everyone wins. With self-publishing companies, the returnable feature frequently costs extra (sometimes a lot extra), and a lot of authors don’t make that additional investment. That means that if the bookstore brings it in and it doesn’t sell, we’re stuck with it. We can’t move it to make room for newer merchandise. It sits on a shelf or in the back room and waits to be marked down to clearance. Most stores aren’t willing to take that risk, because it costs us money.

Some questions to ask yourself: what are my expectations? And be honest with yourself about this. What is it that you want? What are you willing to put into it? This should be a financial consideration, yes, but it should also be a degree of work. How hard are you willing to work? How much time and effort are you willing to put into it? Be honest about your skills, and about the skills of those you may ask for help. For most people, putting out a book is a long-cherished, deeply-held dream, and yes, the package is a part of that. A bad cover, bad formatting, bad editing, can kill a book far more easily than most of us want to believe.

-Make a decision. After you’ve done your research, after you’ve asked (and answered) a lot of difficult questions about yourself, your manuscript, and your expectations and dreams, it’s time to make a decision. Do you want to self-publish? Do you want to traditionally publish? Do you want to sign with an agent?

For myself, the answers were no, yes, and yes, and that’s based more on my evaluation of my own shortcomings than any sense of snobbishness about self-publishing. I know what I can do- I also know what I can’t do. I can’t design a book to save my life. I can’t do a good job packaging. I can’t catch all of the errors and tweaks, I can’t find the things that another set of eyes and experiences can make amazing, and let’s be honest, I suck at self-marketing. I try. I do…badly. Even if I’d had the money to make the investment into self-publishing, it would not have been a good fit for me. Plus, my dream for as long as I can remember has been to go into a store and see it on the shelf. It may not be on many shelves, but it can be, and to me, that’s extraordinary. As for the agent, this was a no duh for me personally. I don’t have contacts, and while I know a lot about the industry, it’s not enough. More to the point, I don’t want to tear my hair out going over contracts and negotiating and trying to make sure all the numbers are right and the payments are done correctly and this and this and that. You know, the business stuff, the stuff that goes right over my head. Or under my feet, depending on how head-in-the-clouds I am on any given day. A good agent isn’t just evaluating the likelihood of your manuscript selling, isn’t just pitching it to editors with the valuable contacts and experience he or she has accumulated. An agent is also helping you manage all the business stuff. That being said, ALWAYS READ YOUR CONTRACTS. Read everything you’re signing. Read everything you’re sent that’s even remotely official. Just because you have Agent Extraordinaire managing the business aspects doesn’t mean you can be clueless. This is your livelihood. Well, part of your livelihood.

There are a few (few) agents who take on self-publishers, mostly in the business and loosely editorial realm. It’s a unique stance, and we’ll see if that widens or not in the next few years. So self-publishing doesn’t immediately mean that an agent to protect your interests is outside the realm of possibility- again, it comes back to doing your research and deciding if this is a good fit for you. If you’re pursuing traditional publishing, an agent is going to get you in far more doors than you’ll find open on your own. Most editors aren’t going to look at unsolicited manuscripts. Editors trust agents to show them things in which they may have interest, things that fill well on a list in a catalogue, things that show the agent has paid attention to the editor’s history and preferences. I’m not at all saying that trad. publishing is impossible if you’re unrepresented, but I am saying it limits your options.

Have you made your choice?
Guess what, it’s back to:Do your research.

I know, you thought you were done with this, right? But now that you’ve identified the best path for you, you need to pick the right door.

-So you want to self-publish? There are a lot of companies out there that can help you. Or, if you want to create and distribute entirely on your own, there’s a lot you need to be aware of. Look at your options. Look at the quality of the products that come out of it. Look at the accessibility of product- will you be available to major retail websites? Major retail stores? Will you be able to sell through your own website? Look at the contracts- not every publisher will allow you to see even a boilerplate contract unless you’re signing it, but google the companies and see what users are saying about them. You want the best bang for your buck- the best product, the best terms, the best accessibility. Don’t just jump on the first wagon you see.

-So you want an agent? Check out the Writers’ Market guides, or Query Tracker, or Agent Query. Check out writers’ forums. Flip open the books you’d be most likely to use as comp titles, books you think would pair very well with your own, and check out the acknowledgments- agents are frequently listed as the lifesavers and mental health companions that they are. Check out agent blogs. Check out agent and agency websites. Follow them on twitter.

Follow.

Do Not Stalk.

Agents are very vocal about whether or not they’re looking for anything at the time, as well as WHAT they’re looking for. KNOW YOUR BOOK- know its age range, know it’s category or genre (s), know how you can compare it to things. Look at what the agent is saying they want- does your book fit? (Personal example: on the L. Perkins Agency website, the Fabulous Sandy’s bio said she was looking for things with strong voice. Ophelia has her faults, God knows, but a lack of voice isn’t one of them.) Where your book meshes with what they’re looking for is what you’re going to want to put in your query. Look at what an agent has sold- do they have sales? Recent sales? Do they represent people you’ve heard of? Every agent has to start somewhere, and a brand new agent isn’t the same as a bad agent, but you want to pay attention.

DO NOT SEND MONEY TO AN AGENT TO READ YOUR MANUSCRIPT. Agents make money when you do, and not before. There are a ton of very good, very reputable agents who aren’t part of the official association, so a lack of membership isn’t a red flag, but if they’re charging you up front? BACK. AWAY. Writer Beware is an excellent resource for known scammers and frauds. Trust your instincts- if you’re getting hinky feelings off something, you’re probably right in thinking that it’s sketchy. Then back your instincts up by checking.

I’ll talk more about querying below, but as you’re researching agents, start making a list of possibilities, agents you think might be interested, agents you’d love to query. Along with their names and agencies, write down pertinent information- website, query email, authors or books they’ve represented that made you think of them, what they say they’re looking for, submission guidelines. This way when you’re actually ready to query, you have all the information right there, instead of making a second desperate search all over creation (also known as the Internet). Agents are not all created equal. They have different personalities, they represent different things. You don’t want to spam every listed agent whether they represent your stuff or not. At best, you’ll be ignored. At worst, they’ll be pissed off, and remember you. That is not how you want to be remembered.

-So you want to submit to publishers without an agent? Yup, you’ve got your research too! And to be honest, yours may be more difficult than anyone else’s, because your information is a little more buried. Your task is to find houses willing to look at unagented manuscripts. Some editors will open to unsoliciteds for a time (like Editor Andrew at Carolrhoda Lab did for this past week) to see if there’s a golden find. Some will let you send it and not immediately shred it for mulch, but it’s kind of on the understanding that the only way it’ll ever be read is if someone gets REALLY bored in the bathroom. The ones you’re mostly going to be looking for will probably be smaller houses. Check websites CAREFULLY. Submission guidelines will be there somewhere.

Let’s leave it here for now, because this is a monster post that’s probably getting a little hard to read, and I’ll be back in a few days with Part 2: Prep Your Shizz.

And I’m going to spend most of the few days writing it trying to come up with a different title, because I can’t take that seriously.

When you tell someone about a project you’re writing or have written, one of the first questions you usually hear is “Where did it come from?” Or, as my agent puts it, “Your brain must be a terrifying place.” (Reason a billion and one that Sandy and I are a really great fit) And most of the time, someone asks me this, and I just kind of start to stammer. The truth is, I have no idea where most of my stories come from. I remember strange things, I think of strange things, and they all just sort of stew together in my brain until suddenly two or more things click together and I sit up and go OOH! THAT COULD WORK!! I can occasionally trace back influences, things that have been roiling around in my mind for weeks or months or even years, but I can only really think of two projects where I could specifically point to something and say “This, this is where it came from”.

But A Wounded Name is one of those projects.

In some ways, it starts out as a pretty broad answer: a lifelong love of Shakespeare. I was the kid who brought Hamlet and Much Ado About Nothing and Measure for Measure to elementary school with me, struggling through the language, and even though I got none of the subtleties or dirty jokes, I could more or less understand what was going on. It was in eighth grade that the appreciation shifted into something deeper, and there are two reasons for that.

The first was that my friend Carl, who was in Junior Thespians with me, performed the dagger monologue from Macbeth for the Districts and State Competitions/Festivals. And did it REALLY WELL. Even the kids in the audience who’d never come up against Shakespeare before got it. Even if they didn’t know the story or the character, they knew that this guy was coming seriously unhinged- and planning something really awful.

The second was that our gifted humanities teacher, Mrs. Shaughnessy, introduced us to Shakespeare in a way that was FUN. We read through Henry IV, Part I in class, and it’s a history play, so it’s easy to get bogged down in the poetically framed politics, but she very brilliantly focused on Hal and Falstaff. Dude, Shakespeare was FUNNY! And PERVY! We were cracking up about it, and when there was a filthy joke based off of slang we didn’t understand, she explained it. This sweet, delicate-looking, soft-spoken teacher in her fifties actually stood there and explained to teenagers that this page and a half of text was actually full of jokes about whether or not a guy’s junk worked. And, to reward us for successfully getting through the play, we took an end of year field trip to the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, where they were performing As You Like It, and we DIED. The performance was amazing, incredibly well done, and that’s when we finally understood that Shakespeare was meant to be performed, not read.

Seriously.

Shakespeare wasn’t published within his lifetime. It was after his death that some of his friends got together and published his plays. Before that point, you experienced Shakespeare by actually experiencing it, by seeing it, hearing it, feeling it. Shakespeare is meant to be performed, and some of us took that to heart.

The next year, three of my good friends and I decided we wanted to do an ensemble acting piece for Districts. We were nervous, because we were freshmen in a program that wasn’t, at the time, freshmen friendly, but two of us had done the summer theatre program with the school and gotten to know a bunch of the older kids, and more importantly the teacher, who was also an old friend of my family, and we figured if we put together something really good, it wouldn’t matter that we were younger, maybe we could still get a spot. I honestly don’t remember how we ended up with the play we did- I remember us looking, all of us digging into any play we could get our hands on. I don’t remember who found the winner.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, by Tom Stoppard, is an absolutely brilliant play that’s woven through Hamlet, but it’s pretty much based off of two lines.

TWO LINES. In all of Hamlet an entire play was able to be based off of TWO LINES.

And they’re an innocuous two line set, nothing glorious or earth-shattering.

CLAUDIUS: Thank you, Rosencrantz, and gentle Guildenstern.

GERTRUDE: Thank you, Guildenstern, and gentle Rosencrantz.

Now this is one of those places where performance is everything, because you can do a LOT of different things with those two lines. Most productions just kind of gloss over them. After all, Ros and Guil are hardly significant characters. They are so generally un-important, in fact, that Shakespeare gives us absolutely nothing to distinguish between them. They are utterly non-distinct, a pair never seen separated. So, some productions play off of that by saying that Claudius doesn’t know them that well, that he puts the adjective with the wrong name, and so Gertrude is gently correcting him with her statement.

Stoppard took those two lines and spun out this wonderful journey of one existential crisis after another, where these two characters are totally at sea in everything that’s going on around them, and lost as they are, can’t help but cry out again and again WHO AM I AND WHAT AM I DOING HERE? Guildenstern even argues, though he thinks he’s talking about the situation, that rather than being opposite sides of the same coin, they are actually the same sides of two coins, able to be manipulated separately and yet still the same thing. This play is fiendishly intelligent, full of wordplay that would make the Bard proud, a tragic sense of inevitability, and yet an unapologetic love of the absurd. Ros and Guil are adrift, are utterly incapable of understanding everything going on around them because Hamlet is, after all, a play where everyone has secrets from each other, but they’re being manipulated by EVERYONE, everyone is trying to use them for their own ends and aims. And in Stoppard’s play, the director is the devious, somewhat implacable Player, leader of the company Hamlet hires for his trap.

We fell in love with this play, and we finally found a scene we thought would work for all four of us, where Hamlet welcomes his pair of old school friends to Elsinore and bids them be respectful to the Player. From that point on, Ros and Guil are trying to figure out what’s going on, and the Player is…well, let’s call it less than direct. There’s a lot of stumbling over words, because English is, after all, a bizarre language, imprecise at the best of times. We practiced and practiced and practiced, we watched two or three different movie versions of Hamlet, we watched the movie production with Tim Roth, Gary Oldman, and Richard Dreyfuss (which is brilliant, by the way), we argued ENDLESSLY over stupid things. Seriously, we spent probably five weeks arguing over the pronunciation of gesture until we finally asked someone. But we had a fairly solid piece when we auditioned, and so our teacher gave us a slot for Districts, and we started practicing even harder.

Our rehearsals often got sidetracked, because as much as we wanted to polish this and make it awesome, the word-play was fantastically fun. We kept looking outside of the scene, or even all the way back to Hamlet to pull in context or hints or allusions because there was just so much wealth to work it. And we asked questions. Not just what does this word mean, or what is he trying to say here, but bigger questions.

Is Hamlet actually crazy?

Does the Player know all of what’s going on?

What are the consequences of trying to understand the situation?

And we asked questions that had absolutely nothing to do with the scene, but were just such interesting questions that we couldn’t help ourselves.

Does Hamlet love Ophelia?

Why does Ophelia lose it?

How much does Gertrude know?

How much does Polonius know?

SO MANY QUESTIONS, and we could debate them endlessly. Honestly, in high school the four of us could debate almost anything endlessly, simply because the discussion itself was that much fun.

We took the piece to Districts and did REALLY well. We got straight superiors, so all three judges in the room thought that we did an amazing job. Not the absolute best job they saw in the room (Critics’ Choice) but a really solid, wonderful job. We were ecstatic. And because of those straight superiors, we automatically got one of the very few slots available for State. Which…pissed off a bunch of the upper classmen, who felt they should get preferential treatment because we had three more years ahead of us to compete. To which our teacher replied that if they wanted that badly to compete in State, they should have worked harder, done better, and ranked higher.

Our teacher didn’t really put up with anyone’s crap.

State is a lot harder than Districts- you have to get at least an excellent at Districts to be able to compete, and because of limited slots, each school tries to bring its best stuff, so the judges rank accordingly. We got an excellent at State, and were ridiculously happy about it.

Senior year, in a fit of nostalgia, we decided to do the same piece again. We hadn’t all four been in a single competition piece since freshmen year, so there was something that felt pretty right about it, and we knew even at the beginning of the year that we weren’t going to all be going to the same colleges. And this time, we had three more years of debates under our belt, three more years of independently dissecting the play we’d all fallen in love with. And someone, one of the parents, I’d suspect, decided to get a picture of us this time.

Now, keeping in mind that this picture was taken TEN AND A HALF YEARS AGO, we have, starting at twelve o’clock: me, as the Player, Betty-Jane as Rosencrantz, JD as Hamlet, and Jeff as Guildenstern.

This time, the ensemble piece wasn’t our main focus. We all had different things we were doing that year. JD was in a duet pantomime (I’m Not as Think as You Drunk I Am, which was absolutely hysterical and won Critics’ Choice), Betty-Jane had monologues and a duet acting scene that were both absolutely brilliant (and off the top of my head I can’t remember your scores, Betty-Jane, sorry!), Jeff was doing Publicity Design (Critics’ Choice and Tech District Representative), and I had a solo, a duet musical, and Playwriting (for Playwriting I received Critics’ Choice and Tech District Representative). We were mostly focused on all of that, so this piece was really just for us, something fun to do together because we’d all been so crazy busy with everything.

And it was. It was brilliant, and fun, and we did well at Districts and not quite as well at State, and that was okay. Because we loved it, and we had a blast asking all those questions again, and asking better questions, deeper questions, questions that used the play as a stepping off point and tried to apply the possible answers against the broader human condition.

Okay, we were super pretentious in high school- aren’t most high schoolers?

The next year, Jeff and I both went down to the College of Theatre and Dance at the University of South Florida, him for the technical track, me for the performance track. Our senior year, he did the theatre honors track, combining that thesis with his honors college one, and he and his honors classmates created, from the ground up, a study on Ophelia. They researched and debated and eventually wrote and designed a production called Remembrances, also known as the Ophelia project. I went to see the performance, and really, it was just brilliant. From every standpoint, honestly, the writing, the acting, the design and execution.

Its sense of time was fluid- interspersed with scenes from Hamlet were moments where the fractured pieces of Ophelia interacted, and memories of happier times with her family. It didn’t try to define Ophelia- it tried to explore her. To understand her.

During its larval stage, Jeff and I used to get together every Thursday for Wine and Laundry night. I lived in a place that didn’t have laundry facilities, and I lived in an area where you REALLY didn’t go to the all-night laundromats unless you wanted to get mugged or raped, and at that time, my weekends were dedicated to Job Number One, which was retail, Job Number Two, which was rehearsals and then performance for the Renaissance Faire, Unpaid Job Number Three, which was tech work on the shows the college put on, for which I received mandatory credits, plus working on my own honors thesis, which was a novel. The only thing that made the weekends distinct was that I didn’t have sit-down class. So, Thursday nights, where conversations would range over every possible topic, and frequently came back to Ophelia, because we both had a long-held interest in her.

Backing up slightly, at the end of my junior year, I’d proposed a thesis project that would take seven questions from/about Shakespeare’s plays and explore them as novellas. One of these seven pieces was going to be about Ophelia, a fractured time piece where her sanity has already slipped but she’s still trying to tell us the story, only she can’t piece it together in the right order. I ended up not doing that because my potential thesis advisor and I disagreed on how to approach them. I didn’t want to research other takes until after I’d written mine, so as to avoid influence, and she felt I needed to research them first so I could support my own opinion.

I love research, but an academic researcher I’ll never be.

And in a way, I was a little grateful that it fell through, because of all the questions I’d intended to face, that one TERRIFIED ME, and when it came to writing, I was only learning to be brave at that point. Back then, I thought if it scared me, that was a sign I should do something else. So, I went back and looked at the only original novel I’d ever finished, back from the beginning of freshmen year of college which desperately needed to be re-written pretty much from the ground up, and asked around for advice on who to approach as an advisor, given that the Creative Writing Dept had never waivered me in to their classes, and at the end of the year, when I met with Dr Omlor, my advisor, for my final evaluation, he told me I was an idiot if I didn’t try to get published.

Over the next few years, Ophelia kept creeping out in small ways. The next year, when I was taking a poetry class at the community college (long story), she found her way into one of the poems. The prompt was to take lines from established pieces and use them within our own poem. I borrowed from both Hamlet and T.S. Eliot (several of his poems, really), and what came out was…I loved it. And I suck at poetry, so for me to say that I love this poem is really kind of extraordinary. There was something broken about it, the way the original lines were left justified and the borrowed lines right justified, the way your eye had to travel across the page, the way the original lines could be read entirely on their own and still tell the story but the borrowed lines added something…I don’t think I’d ever loved one of my own poems before. At about the same time, I was writing a Harry Potter fanfiction called (and here I’m outing myself, oh well) “Where the Breezes Know My Name”. It’s a STRANGE little piece, but at the time it was the most poetic prose I’d ever written, and for YEARS I swore about it, because I thought it was beautiful and there was no way in hell I could unravel it from the original source enough to use it for anything original.

A few years later, I woke up in the middle of the night with Ophelia’s voice in my head, specifically the first few lines of the book, which have remained unchanged from that moment.

But I was in the middle of another project at the moment, one that was quickly growing to the point that it needed to be split into two books (and will thankfully never, ever, EVER see the light of day), so I wrote down the lines on the notebook beside my bed and figured I’d forget about it.

But Ophelia, as a figment, is sneakily persistent. She’d pop up in my dreams, shoving these eerie and lovely and unsettling images at me, I’d hear her voice and write the lines down on napkins, scrap papers, business cards, sometimes even my arm or the back of my hand if I didn’t have anything else handy. Ophelia would not go away, and she was bound and determined that she wasn’t going to be quiet.

Having Ophelia in my head was like edging into a kind of insanity, and it didn’t really stop until I finally sat down, typed the first lines in a fresh word document, and let her take the reins.

From start to finish, the first draft took twenty-three days, and because of work and other obligations, I couldn’t write every day. Once I typed in the last line, it was like this massive weight was off me, like suddenly I could breathe again. For weeks, I’d been drowning in Ophelia, and suddenly my head was clear again.

But where she first started gaining form, where the questions first started giving her a distinct and permanent existence in some part of my brain, was 1999, when Jeff, JD, Betty-Jane, and I first sat together over a battered library copy of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, which an eye towards taking it to competition.

There are a number of words in the English language (or, honestly, probably any language) that have been used so loosely, so borderline inaccurately, for so long, the perceived meaning has started to shift. We actually have words for that (how cool is that?): connotation and denotation.

Remember those from ninth grade English?

Denotation is the literal definition of any given word. The dictionary definition, if you will. It’s the meaning that doesn’t shift much over time, or at least, is much more slow to shift. Like, a glove is an accessory/article of clothing worn over the hand with individual fingers.

Connotation is the not necessarily slang, but it’s the perceived meaning of a word. Much more so than denotation, connotation reflects the current culture. In this case, a glove isn’t only an article of clothing on the hand, it’s also a slang term for condom.

…well, I guess we know my mind’s in the gutter on a pretty regular basis.

Why do I bring up connotation and denotation? Because there are some words we use on a regular basis in talking about books that we use incorrectly.

Like dystopia. It’s become rather a catch-all for genuine dystopia, post-apocalyptic, evil modern regime, and some genre-benders that only partially fit within the definition. We use it to describe just about everything grim and touching on anything loosely governmental. BUT. The definition of dystopia (and don’t trust Merriam-Webster online, their definition sucks) is a society built upon utopian principles that, through innate human error, political or spiritual corruption, a/o self-initiated disaster, decays into something nearly a parody of its original, idealistic principles.

Here’s where we tie back into the title: cliffhanger is another term that’s experienced a shift between original and perceived meaning. We hear it being used for anything that makes you want more, anything that ends abruptly in such a way as to leave you intensely craving more.

The thing is, the original (and accurate) definition of cliffhanger is contained within the phrase itself. Cliffhanger. It came about as radio and television shows developed, and they’d leave you at the end of a week’s episode with someone literally hanging off a cliff. Does he make it? Or does he fall? Will she celebrate a rescue? Or have to plan a funeral? Do the humans understand Lassie? Or does Timmy finally drown in that damn well? You’d be left with your character in genuine, life-threatening DANGER and then have to wait until next week’s episode to find out if he or she is okay.

Here’s an example where the meaning has blurred. (WARNING: SPOILERS FOR CATCHING FIRE BY SUZANNE COLLINS BELOW) If you talk to most people who’ve read Catching Fire, they call the ending a cliffhanger. What?! *gasp!* There’s no District 12 anymore?! *shock!* It’s not, though. A cliffhanger, that is, it’s sort of a shock if you haven’t been paying attention to the repeated stories of the 13th District that wasn’t really mentioned at all in the first book. It’s not a cliffhanger because it’s not leaving us in the middle of active (or if you’re a Tom Clancy fan, clear and present) danger. Katniss and a handful of others have been rescued from the arena, they’re on their way to promised safety, the main action of the second book is finished. The “There is no District Twelve, Katniss” is the lead-in to the next book, a way to spark the interest that naturally wanes as the resolution ties neatly together, a way to keep you chomping at the bit for the next installment. It’s the carrot dangling from the end of the stick.

But it’s not dangling over the end of a cliff.

On my second What I’ve Been Reading post, The Streelight Reader asked me if The Dream Thieves by Maggie Stiefvater ends in a cliffhanger, and I had to think about what to answer. (Don’t worry, NO SPOILERS) Because, by the current definition of cliffhanger, by the connotation of the word…sure, it’s a bit abrupt, it’s a definite lead in to the next book, and it’s a pair of sentences that make your heart skip few beats as you stare at the page.

But I wouldn’t call it a cliffhanger.

One of the things I love about Maggie Stiefvater’s books, especially the two we’ve seen thus far in the Raven Cycle, is that each book has its own story. The series has an arching story, an overall goal and way of getting there, but the individual books aren’t merely installments. Each book has its own arc, has its own threads that mostly resolve and tie back together even as they form a pattern within the larger story.

Do you remember those friendship bracelets that little kids make with embroidery floss? (Or not so little kids, given that I made one right before BEA) There’s one that’s called, among other names, a Triple Diamond. Hang on, let me throw in a picture:

It uses twenty strands of floss in five different colors, knotting in chevrons and inverted chevrons to form the diamonds, and you have to be able to knot both left and right, sometimes switching direction in the middle of a knot. The overall design, the finished pattern, is like the series. The story of the Raven Cycle is that completed work, with all those individual diamonds linking together into a cohesive creation. But every thread, every color, every individual knot, those are the elements of the books on their own. Just as the main characters can each be assigned a thread color and we can call it that character’s path through the series, we can also call those threads individual plot elements. They have to resolve in every set in order to continue through the rest of the books.

So the black thread (let’s call it Ronan) can’t just dangle off into nothingness and still be fully present through the resolution of the series. His smaller stories, his episodes, HAVE to resolve within each set.

The Dream Thieves is not merely a continuation of the quest for Glendower. It’s not merely a second installment, continuing the same story and trudging relentlessly onward. This is its own book, its own story, a set of snarls and knots that resolves into a part of the larger pattern, even as the threads set themselves for the next block of pattern. Without that preparation, without those two sentences that make your gut clench with wonder and anticipation and just a bit of fear, things would just kind of…fizzle…after the necessary resolution of those smaller threads.

But we’re not left in the middle of something. We’re not left with our Raven Boys (including Blue) in imminent peril. We’re not left with them over the lip of a cliff, literal or metaphorical. Instead, we’re left with a clue- the frame of a question that hasn’t yet found its voice or shuffled the words into the right order to follow the transition from declarative to inquisitive. That question, once it’s found, will be the starting block for the third book (and seriously, can’t wait; if I haven’t scared you off with grammar and craft-based-analogies, READ THESE BOOKS IF YOU HAVEN’T ALREADY), but it’s necessarily built off the resolution of the book two story.

This is a very long answer to what’s probably a simple question, Streetlight Reader, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while, as I see the word cliffhanger more and more in book reviews.

In a sense, I know this goes counter to a lot of advice that’s out there. You have to trust your story, your characters, your writing, and that’s still all true. You have to trust the greater concept.

But you still can’t trust your draft.

Drafting, the process of creating the story, (of giving birth to it, if you will) is an emotioal and at times painful process. Oftentimes with drafting, we become so thoroughly wrapped up in the characters and the story and the world that we lose touch with small bits of reality. Not all of it, or at least not usually all of it, but the things that filter through our experiences, the things that put everything else in proper context, those are usually the first to go.

This month, outside of a flurry of real life issues, has been devoted to editing my October and November projects, and it’s led me to realize some interesting things about drafts.

Emotions, when it comes to how you’re reading your first draft, are largely unreliable.

Not entirely, and not always, but largely, because we haven’t applied that filter in the process of writing, and so we’re often unable to apply it in that first re-read.

After finishing the rough drafts on both projects, I didn’t touch them again until this month. The first book sat for two and a half months, the second sat for a month and a half, with absolutely no contact or conscious reminder of the contents. I needed some distance before I could even hope to do a satisfactory job of improving things, because when I write, I lose myself in the pages. I know the characters SO WELL that it’s hard to separate myself from their lives sometimes, especially because I know so much more of what’s going on than the pages will ever (should ever) tell. I know what’s supposed to happen so well that if I don’t get a little distance from it, my brain somehow skips over the fact that it doesn’t always actually happen.

And with my October project, I learned that I really can’t trust the emotions that come up even on a re-read, even with that distance.

Real life directly influences our writing.

Not always in the way non-writers assume (not in the sense that we deliberately translate people we know into the story at every opportunity), but in the sense that what we’re going through, the emotions we experience even when we’re not at the computer or notebook writing, resonate in our work.

October was a very stressful, strange month. I was out of work more than I was there because I had to use all of my paid time within a couple of weeks, so there was a lot of running around immediately beforehand to get everything appropriately arranged there. I suddenly had a lot of time on my hands and not much idea what to do with it other than writing- I haven’t had that kind of free time since I started working nine years ago. (The summer of unemployment doesn’t count, as I was frantically putting out applications and hoping for interviews) I was tackling a story that scared me. My October project had a great deal to do with mothers and daughters, with fathers and daughters, with twisted friendships and relationships, with fear and murder and a kindlier death. It was a story that relied almost entirely on emotions in all their terrifying range. And in the end of September, there was a death in my family. In October, there was a funeral. In January, we’re still adjusting.

What we write finds ways to resonate. Through the month of October, as I wrote of death and family, I more than once found myself literally sobbing in front of my computer, hardly able to breathe for the emotions lodged tightly in my throat, tears blurring my eyes until I could barely see the words on the scree, and I couldn’t be sure if that was because of the high-charge of my characters’ emotions or it was because of my own. Or both. Even two and a half months later, going back through with a critical eye to edit it, I find myself choking up at the same sections.

And this is why you can’t trust your drafts: because you, as the writer, are too invested to know if your reaction is from the process of writing, or from what’s written.

Even distance, even time, aren’t enough to force a separation if emotional recall is woven through every word.

Catharsis may be what some readers seek, is what more readers achieve (books like The Fault in Our Stars and The Statistical Probablity of Love at First Sight are amazing examples of books that left me feeling drained and filled at the same time), but it’s not the writer’s catharsis that anyone is interested in. This phrase comes up all the time when we’re talking about reviews, but it was a broader application: books are for the reader. When we make the decision to publish- by whatever means we choose to publish- we are deliberately putting our book out of our hands. We can’t control how it’s received, how it’s regarded or reviewed, and we can’t control the reactions people have. A book, the act of reading a book, is an intensely personal thing, and everyone will respond in a different way. Different things resonate, reverberate, different notes and chords are struck based on each individual history and experience and emotional state.

When you’re reviewing your draft, you might be bawling at a certain scene- but it might not be the immense impact on readers you think it might be.

It might be a reflection of your mental state at the time of writing.

It might be a reflection of some horrible thing you know will happen to the character later, and right now it just hurts like hell to read how happy they are (I get that during Avatar: The Last Airbender frequently through season two, pretty much any time Zuko is actually happy, because you know, you just KNOW, he doesn’t get to stay that way yet).

It might be a reflection of your mental state NOW, as you’re going back through and finding resonances that weren’t in place when you wrote it.

This is why other readers, even if they’re not critical readers or true critique partners, are so essential. SOMEONE else needs to read it, preferably more than person, so you have a way to measure your own response. There’s an assumption out there that writers must think everything they write is either brilliant or trash-worthy, and the truth is, it’s both at any given moment. The emotional ups and downs of a dedicated writer are…dizzying, at the least.

If we’re lucky, when we’ve given a project time and distance, we come back to it more impressed than when we left it. We come back to it awed and humbled by funny lines we don’t remember, by touching scenes that tug our heartstrings, but remember, DON’T TRUST IT.

I mentioned a few times that my NaNo project was a rewrite, so I thought it might be interesting to do some first draft comparisons now that the numbers are all in.

I wrote the First Version in early 2008. It was my first time writing YA, and for a while it refused to settle into a voice. Somewhere in a folder I still have the paperclipped stash where the first two chapters were written in first person, then rewritten in third. Then I ignored both of them and started over in first. I don’t have the day by day breakdowns, partly because this was before I started doing that. Writing by hand meant that I didn’t really have a good grasp of word count, either per day or per chapter, and even though I typed up each chapter as I finished instead of waiting for the end, I didn’t really understand at that point how word count was supposed to translate.

(As proof, I offer you the word count of the novel I wrote for my college honors thesis: 215K+. I so wish I was joking)

But, I do have the chapter counts.

Prologue: 286 (yes, it had a prologue, and worse, it was one of those that drops you present tense into the middle of a high-octane moment, then takes you back however long for the beginning of the story)
Chapter 1: 7895 (waaaaay too long for a chapter, as I didn’t understand at that point)
Chapter 2: 7805
Chapter 3: 7758
Chapter 4: 7875
Chapter 5: 10665 (and no, I didn’t accidentally include an extra number in there, that’s really how long it was)
Chapter 6: 8161
Chapter 7: 5107
Chapter 8: 7173
Chapter 9: 6478
Chapter 10: 8161 (am I a nerd that it seriously amuses me how two chapters had the exact same word count?)
Chapter 11: 8076
Chapter 12: 5211
Chapter 13: 6840
Chapter 14: 4241
Epilogue: 296
Total word count: 102028

On its own, it’s not an egregious word count. A little overlong, but not terrible. I was in love with it, not so surprising, and given that I’ve never had much of a hand at self-editing, I started researching agents pretty much as soon as I went through looking for typos and inconsistencies. Still, I got a few bites off of it before I reluctantly retired it to query a stronger a project.

When I retired it, though, I had no intention of leavig it to die. I still believed, very passionately, in the story and the characters, and (strangely enough) in the setting. It just needed more of some things and less of others. It needed a tighter line, higher stakes, needed some sharper edges. I just wasn’t sure at that point how to achieve those things. So I set it aside, waiting for the pieces to come together.

It took a little over three years, but in mid-October or so, as I was neck deep in another project, suddenly something clicked. Or rather, about a dozen somethings. I couldn’t play with it until I was done with the other project, so that’s when I made the decision to do NaNo, even though I prefer to give three or four weeks between projects so my brain doesn’t fry.

Here are the counts for the Second Version (chapters are listed under the day they were finished, with total chapter word count)

Rewriting something is very, very different from writing something new. I had to decide what to keep, what to keep but change, and what to discard completely, and had to decide what that did to the story and to the characters. There are scenes that I miss SO BADLY because I loved them, some of them because they were sweet, some of them because they still have the ability to crack me up, but I had to evaluate everything on a simple question: does this do what I need it to do? For a lot of those scenes I loved, while they did wonderful things purely for character, the overall answer was no. They didn’t do enough for the story, so they had to go.

For me, doing this rewrite was a lot harder than putting down something wholly new. I knew the characters so well from three previous books that sometimes I forgot that my audience wouldn’t know them the way I did (something that will doubtless prove to be a trial when I go back to edit it in a few weeks). I wanted to stay true to the characters I’d fallen in love with, but more importantly, I wanted the characters to be true. Which actually made me fall in love with some of them even more.

And made me realize that I am merciless when it comes to putting my favorite characters through horrible things.

What doing this also taught me is that I have a process. It’s a weird process, based on writing only a couple of days a week but writing ALL DAY, but it’s mine. That process works for me, lets me get a LOT done, and going outside of that process, while a valuable experiment, is something I need to not do in the future if I want to spare myself fruitless frustration.

After I saved the completed file, I closed it out and haven’t looked at it. Starting this evening (maybe), I’ll be starting on edits for my October project, the file for which I haven’t opened since I finished it. I need time away from a draft before I can go back to it constructively, need the time to back away, to gain some distance so I can see more clearly what needs to be repaired, replaced, or removed. After I do the edits on that one, and take some time to mentally recover, then I’ll come back to my NaNo project with a wiser eye.

This is where I admit that I’ve learned two very, very important things this month.

First thing- trying to push myself to write every day around a full time job is basically equivalent to stomping all over my productivity. I am not a writer who paces myself. I’m a writer who binges on words and scenes and whole chapters at a time.

Second thing- I need to never, ever, EVER draft back to back. Going from a draft to an edit, all good. Going from an edit to a draft, still good. Draft to draft? NEVER AGAIN. I need time to recharge after a draft, and editing uses a very different part of my brain than drafting. Trying to draft two projects in a row, especially projects SO radically different, damaged something in my brain, I think.

That’s not to say my NaNo was a failure- it definitely wasn’t. I made my word count and then some.

More importantly, it’s taught me more about how I write.

There are a lot of books and websites and people out there purporting to tell people how to write. I kind of hate them. Not in a personal sort of way, but in a “it’s the principle of the thing” kind of way, because everyone writes in a different way. The important thing isn’t to learn “how to write”, it’s to learn “how YOU write”. Learning what does and does not work for you, for your productivity and efficiency, for your style and voice, for your characters, that’s essential to your growth as a writer.

And doing NaNo has taught me that doing NaNo is not necessarily what’s best for me.

I only wrote one day this past week- I spent Thanksgiving morning and early afternoon sinking into the words, got seven thousand or so of them down, and I’m happy with them. And then I didn’t touch it. I started the Christmas movies. I played with my new phone- or more specifically, played with the ringtones, which kind of makes me wish I received more calls. I pulled all my many MANY boxes and bags and containers of beads and started organizing them all. I repaired some old jewelry. I read some old manuscripts.

And I desperately needed that break.

Because I have a day off tomorrow, and I fully intend to go to my writing cave and lose myself in the story again. I’m super excited for what happens next, and I’m actually really near the end of the story, which always adds a certain thirst to keep going. In trying to force myself to write outside of my habits, outside of ways I knew worked for me, I made writing into a chore, rather than letting it be the joy it is and should be.

So I’m going to write tomorrow, but after that not for a few days, and we’ll see how it goes after that.

By now I’ve admitted to myself that the next time I do NaNo, I need to not worry about churning out daily word counts. I’m not quite sure how I’ve managed it, but somehow the attempt to write every single day actually made me less productive. My results this week show that to a very large degree, mainly because once I hit the NaNo goal, I went back to doing it my way.

(which is to take my days off and camp out in a public writing cave, where I don’t have nearly as many distractions, and whenever else in the week inspiration strikes)

14 November: Didn’t write at all. Instead, I took another reading day and lost myself in Reached by Ally Condie. It’s hard for me to read new stuff while I’m writing, so I tend to either reread old favorites, or save the new stuff for days where I know I’m not going to be writing at all. It keeps what I’m reading from sneaking into what I’m writing. Plus, after work, it was pizza and bad movie night with my brother. We’re continuing my education in the Bond movies, but I’m having trouble forcing myself through the list. The early ones hurt my brain SO BADLY.
Word count for the day: zero.

15 November: Day off, but also kind of an off day, at least writing wise. Went over to the mother’s house to do laundry while the brother baked pumpkin bread (which smelled and tasted DELICIOUS), and we watched Starship Troopers and John Leguizamo’s Freaks while those things were happening (oh, and Troopers? He’ll deny this vociferously, but that was my first official bad movie night). Then we went and saw Wreck-it Ralph, which, if you’ve grown up playing any sort of video or arcade games, you HAVE to go see. The story was cute, led exactly where it was supposed to, still had a nice little surprise, but the characters were superb and the gamer jokes AWESOME. Eventually got some writing done, but wasn’t really stressing about it. By this point I’d landed pretty solidly in the ‘meh’, not in the story but in the process.
Word count for the day: 1839

16 November: Full day of work, but felt pretty good afterwards, and I was starting to get into a really challenging, difficult, exciting part. I often find that the pieces that are the most difficult to write in any given story are the ones I most look forward to. We’re reaching a point of political and personal trauma, rapid changes, lines being drawn, and someone having to choose which of those lines to step up to or cross. All about decisions and choices, and most importantly of all, consequences.
Word count for the day: 2464

17 November: Full day of work, a good one but a busy one, and I came home completely brain dead. I was going to write- even opened up the computer and put one of the old standbys in the player- and then ended up reading some amazing Harry Potter fanfic while letting the Whitney Houston Cinderella play four times in a row because I was too lazy to get up and change the disc. Probably should have felt guilty. Didn’t.
Word count for the day: zero.

18 November: Schedule wise this was a weird day, but an ultimately productive one. Went to the mother’s and watched the brother play Lego LOTR, which was funny enough on its own, but then you combine the ACTUAL MOVIE VOICES and the ridiculous Lego in-jokes, and I was dying. Lunch instead of dinner with the family, because the mothers were on their way out of town for the week, and then I found a writing cave for a few hours. This early-dark stuff has my brain all turned around; it makes writing near windows very strange. BUT- lots of words and good scenes done, enough that I wasn’t that grumpy about having to go to the holiday meeting for work that night.
Word count for the day: 6911

19 November: Full day of work, then came home, put the South Park movie on repeat, and read more Harry Potter fanfiction. No shame.
Word count for the day: zero.

20 November: Day off, spent MUCH time in the writing cave, and came away with my most productive day of the month, applicable to word count, chapter tally, and just what I accomplished in the scenes I got down. Got less productive once I got home and had some chores to do, and then tried to write while watching Firefly, which gets a little un-shiny, but I was still REALLY happy with how everything turned out.
Word count for the day: 9482

Total word count so far for NaNo: 65310

So I’ve met the NaNo goal, but stopping now just seems silly. I’ll keep going until I finish the draft. Then I’m spending at least two weeks binge-reading all the shiny new things I’ve been stockpiling over the past two months.

If you’re doing NaNo, how are you doing? Check in below! And remember to back up your stuff, even if you just email it to yourself. After so much work, it would greatly suck for it to vanish.